But while many Americans see their cars as an extension of their individual freedom, to some of us owning a car is a burden, and in a city a double burden. I find the recrafting of the city in order to lessen — or eliminate — the need for cars to be not just grudgingly acceptable, but, yes, an expansion of my individual freedom.

My first custom app project was an executive information management console for pharmaceutical wholesaler SUN-S in Sendai, Japan, circa 1987, plotting their market position over time vs competitors using revenue for size of bubble, market share for x axis and growth rate for y axis.

Thanks to the success of flash memory-based iPod, iPhone, iPad and now MacBook Air product lines, Apple has become the largest buyer of NAND flash semiconductors among computer manufacturers, and among the top three buyers across all industries. If the remaining MacBook models are redesigned as Steve Jobs hinted they would around flash storage and no optical drives, and further tuning improves already impressive performance, the next generation of MacBook Pros are going to sell very well.

Less expensive, much lighter, considerably faster and with a cool new App Store built in, the 2011 MacBook lineup should significantly accelerate OS X market share gains.

Apple is including an 8GB “Software Reinstall Drive” USB flash memory device with the new MacBook Air laptops introduced today. I wish they had gone with SD instead, but since they can’t seem to justify the cost of including SD card slots in the low-end MacBooks this is the best alternative, and you can’t put a keychain/lanyard hole in an SD card.

In writing MacPaint, Bill was as concerned with whether human readers would understand the code as he was with what the computer would do with it. He later said about software in general, “It’s an art form, like any other art form… I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I’m a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it’s doing… And maybe that was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple… If you want to get it smooth, you’ve got to rewrite it from scratch at least five times.”

One of the transformations, however, made my hair stand on end: it could flip a color picture from the red, green, blue color space of the computer display to the cyan, magenta, yellow, black color space necessary for exposing printing plates for printing color. That meant that a $15,000 bundle of our scanner plus Photoshop 0.35 plus a Mac II was in principle a competitor for the $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 color scanning and retouching solutions then used in the printing industry. If we could only strike a deal, we were sure to sell some scanners.

1995-01-17 05:46+09, fifteen years ago this morning, a major earthquake hit Kobe and a very large number of impressive structures designed and built by, serious, credentialed adults collapsed, killing over 6,000 people in a land obsessed with disaster preparedness. My friends who were there survived, the city has recovered well, but the impact it had on the local economy and Japan at large is still being felt today. As the old saying goes, earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.

We were living in Menlo Park, California at the time, and I had just welcomed my first official partner, a former Apple Japan employee, to my consultancy, something I should have done six years earlier when Third Culture Enterprises began. The earthquake severely damaged his father’s business and he had to return to Japan immediately, ending our partnership. A year later we moved away from Silicon Valley to a suburb of Sacramento and within a year of that my primary Japanese consulting contract was canceled. Just as the worldwide web began to boom, my career went into a tailspin.

For a spoiled first-world 白人 with all the advantages of a good education, family and health, any blame for career setbacks rests with me. Today, considering the negative impact an earthquake on the other side of the globe had on my life, the trauma of those whose lives are at the epicenter of these catastrophes is unimaginable.

I’ve started playing with the Google Japanese input method first released last month. Even in beta it is stable and fast enough to use as my primary IME, and the dictionaries built from Google’s search index seem to work well. When I tried inputting my name, the first suggestion it offered after typing 「じょえ」 was French chef ジョエル・ロブション (Joël Robuchon), something that would never have happened out of the box with Kotoeri.